Max Ortiz/The Detroit News Boxing trainer Milton McCrory, right, uses his years of experience to train 14-year-old William Pittman at the Kronk gym. McCrory gave up his boxing career for a regular paycheck.

Champion gives up ring for family life

Milton McCrory shuns glamor for regular paycheck

United Press International WBC World Welterweight Champion Milton McCrory celebrates with a dance in the ring after knocking out challenger Milton Guest in their championship fight Jan. 14, 1984.

By Fred Girard / The Detroit News

    To an outsider, he looks like just another pair of hands on the assembly line, dropping front-end frames onto 300-400 convertibles every day at DaimlerChrysler’s Sterling Heights assembly plant.

    But this particular line-worker, 39-year-old Milton McCrory, was once welterweight boxing champion of the world.

    He turned his back on the fame, the world travel, the big-money paydays, and chose instead to be what he calls “a regular guy.”

    A third of the boxers who helped build Detroit’s Kronk Gym into the greatest champion factory in the history of the sport have met sad, even tragic ends — dead, addicted or in prison.

    McCrory’s kid brother, Steve, was one of them. Steve McCrory was a brilliantly elusive fighter who, after winning gold at the 1984 Olympics, turned to the cameras with a huge smile and said, “Detroit, this is for you.”

    However, his career and fortune dissipated in a haze of drugs and women, friends and associates said. He eventually went broke and hocked his medal at a Southfeld pawnshop. After a lingering illness, he slipped into a coma and died at Detroit Receiving Hospital in August at the age of 36.

    Milton McCrory said he never was tempted by boxing’s underbelly.

    “That just wasn’t in my personality,” he said.

    Actually, neither was boxing.

    In 1972, when he was 12 years old, working hard at school and delivering papers every day, his father, Elvin, made him and his little brother take up boxing.

    A couple of kids two doors down on Marx Street, Jimmy and Danny Paul, had started training as boxers at Lasky Recreation Center, along with another neighbor, Duane Thomas, and somebody had mentioned they might all make a good deal of money some day.

    Nine-year-old Stevie loved it from the start because he simply could not be hit. Milton had to work harder, and never really enjoyed himself.

    “I never loved boxing. All I ever wanted to do was play baseball,” he said. “I was a very good baseball player. I think I could have made it to the Tigers organization someday.

    “But my father used to hide my baseball glove in the basement so I’d go to boxing instead.

    “I quit boxing about four times to go back to baseball — once was my senior year at (Detroit) Pershing, when I started every game — right field, center field or pitcher.”

    But by then, the boxing talents of all five kids from Knox Street had become apparent. Lasky trainer Jacque Farmer had turned them over to Emanuel Steward at Kronk Gym. Under Steward’s tutelage, those five kids went on to 11 national amateur championships, four world professional titles, and little Stevie’s gold medal.

    Duane Thomas won the World Boxing Council super-welterweight championship. But only weeks before Steve McCrory was buried last August, Thomas, 39, was shot to death in front of a grimy east side party store in a minor drug dispute that turned major.

    Milton McCrory, the reluctant warrior, won three national amateur titles for Kronk. He turned pro in the late 1970s and reeled off 27 wins without a loss. He won the WBC welterweight title in 1983 with a decision over Colin Jones and defended it successfully five times — until the night in December 1985 when he met World Boxing Association champ Donald “Cobra” Curry in a bout to unify the two titles. Curry scored a second-round knockout of McCrory, who was unconscious for several minutes after he was counted out.

    He said that night he would give up boxing within two years.

    In 1994, Curry was named in a federal drug-conspiracy indictment, along with Kronk boxers Darrell Chambers and William “Stanley” Longstreet. Curry had accompanied the two men on a trip to the Bahamas in September 1992, when they bought $150,000 in cocaine from undercover U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was acquitted by a jury after an 11-day trial in 1995, but had gone broke defending himself. Longstreet went to prison but is now out; Chambers was sentenced to life.

    There were other setbacks for McCrory — after his second loss, a bloody TKO at the hands of Mike McCallum in April 1987 — Steward had to take him to a plastic surgeon to repair his gashed eyelid.

    But what forced Milton McCrory into making the most momentous decision of his life was something far more elemental: He yearned for his family — his wife, Stephanie, daughter Joya, and son Milton Jr.

    “I was in California. It was 1990. I’d been fighting in Vegas, and I went to California with Tommy (Hearns). I was supposed to get a manager, I was promised a lot of things, but a lot of things never went my way.

    “It was the holidays and I was just so homesick. I was thinking about my kids. I just quit. I realized I’d spent my whole youth doing something that I just didn’t really love. That really pushed me to come back home. The dream of boxing just wasn’t my life. I wanted to come back and be with my kids and just live a regular life.”

    He spends his time with his family now and trains young boxers in the evenings. He said he has never regretted his decision.

    “... I don’t hang my head because I work at Chrysler,” he said. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, what happened to you, what happened to all your money?’ When I stopped fighting a lot of people thought it was drug-related, stuff like that — but that wasn’t the case. This job at Chrysler is the first job of my life, the first real job. Everybody was wondering, ‘Why is he in here?’ I work because I have to make a living.

    “I never was interested in some of the other things — all the fame, the people who wanted to be around you. I wanted to be just a straight-up, honest guy.”